The Inscrutable Henry Ford (Part II), Frederick Winslow Taylor and Taylorism

            

Henry Ford, 1919 (LC)

Ford’s first prototype was constructed in 1891. 

Quadricycle -- 1996

In 1896 a refined model was built, the Quadricycle, and if we are to believe the legend, Ford found it too big for the woodshed door. He then knocked down a wall, and pushed the car on a rainy street. With wife Clara holding an umbrella and a friend on a bicycle warning horsemen along the way, Ford started his engine and took his first ride.

 Ford faced many more obstacles and challenges along the way before founding the Ford Motor Company in 1903. Two precursor companies failed, as Ford and his financial backers differed as to the target market and the role of racing in publicizing his cars.

           Racing was extremely important to Henry Ford and others during the pioneer days of the automobile industry. As now, racing results in publicity that cannot be acquired any other way. It cultivates a following interested in speed, a powerful and attractive quality associated with any form of transportation. Racing success was reflective of technological sophistication, and racing tested, both then and now, demonstrator technologies that were eventually introduced into everyday vehicles.  

Henry Ford, standing, and Barney Oldfield in 1902, with the "999" racing automobile

            At the turn of the twentieth century no production automobile in America had a greater sophistication or reputation than the Winton, a car made in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1903, a Winton driven by Horatio Nelson Jackson would be the first to cross transcontinental America. In October 1901, Ford challenged Alexander Winton to a match race, and won. A year later, Ford built the famous 999 and set a new speed record.⁸Consequently, he was known all over America and recognized as a key player on the Detroit automobile scene. 

            It was from racing that Ford recognized the importance of shedding weight at every instance to gain more speed. A powerful engine is only one part of a racer’s equation, for the ratio of horsepower to weight is far more critical than just total horsepower alone in a racing machine. It was that quest for strength and lightness that led Henry to his discovery of vanadium alloy metal. He did not originate the use of vanadium in the automobile industry, for the French manufacturer Peugeot used it in racing machines prior to Ford’s discovery. But he understood the alloy’s utility in a production vehicle, and vanadium alloy steel became a critical material used in the Model T. Until metal could be alloyed into a very hard material, it could not be machined with the precision needed for parts interchangeability. The alternative was softer metal pieces that had to be “fitted” with files and jigs, one by one, to each vehicle. As the story goes, Ford was on the beach after a race in Florida where there had been an accident. Ford would later recount that, “There was a big smashup and a French car was wrecked . . . After the wreck I picked up a little valve strip stem. It was very light and very strong. I asked what it was. Nobody knew.”⁹Ford had the valve stem analyzed, discovered that it was vanadium steel, and that this material gave three times the strength per weight when compared to production steel. 

Saturday Evening Post, 1911

          In 1903, Henry Ford made a third attempt to establish an automobile firm with himself at the helm, and the Ford Motor Company as we know it today was founded. It began with $28,000 in capital, and the firm never raised another cent by selling stock until after Henry Ford died in 1947. A number of early models were produced between 1904 and 1908 that sold for a low price and had a reputation for reliability. In 1906 Ford produced the Model N, a $600 car, and the firm sold a record 9,000 cars and had revenues of $5.8 million. In the wake of this success with the Model N during the winter of 1906 and 1907, plans began to evolve for the production of Model T, one most important vehicles in the history of the automobile.

Ford Model N

            Once the T was designed, it was fixed, thus eliminating expensive retooling costs. With the design “frozen,” the focus of activities at the Ford Motor Company shifted to production. While the practice of mass production emerged at Ford after 1908, it was both a reflection of distinctively American developments within the nascent auto industry beyond those taking place at the Ford Motor Company.¹⁰

(LC)

            From the mid-1890s to 1908, skilled machinists dominated automobile production. They commanded the production processes of small-scale firms. Usually British, German, or generational Americans, they moved to the automobile industry from carriage making operations, bicycle manufacturing, or other trades. The highly-skilled machinists determined the pace of work, set the standards for the finished product, and hired/fired unskilled workers. “As the aristocrat of the shop,” wrote Stephen Meyer “the all-around machinist knew some mechanical drawing and mathematics, how to operate different classes of machine tools, and how to perform fitting, filing, and assembly operations at the bench.”¹¹The machinist used finely-honed skills while leading a team of apprentices and laborers. Meyer concluded that “Their knowledge represented their power in the production process and resulted in the powerful shop traditions of the autonomous craftsmen . . . this shop culture controlled and regulated production through various output quotas and restrictions on the amount of effort exerted or output manufactured.”¹²As a result, production was slow and car prices were high. Early automobiles were novel, and sold to the elite. James Flink asserted that “so long as and wherever such artisanal production persisted, labor productivity was extremely low.”¹³

Interior Of Piquette Avenue plant, prior to mass production, www.autolife.umd.umich.edu.

          

However, throughout the nineteenth century these and other artisanal skills were challenged by new technologies aimed at supplanting manual labor and raising production volume. Americans had been fascinated with motion and its role in production going back to Oliver Evans’ late eighteenth century automated flour mill. The nineteenth century pork disassembly line as perfected in Cincinnati, Ohio, was another example of the American interest in production flow. While Ford claimed the meat processing disassembly line had influenced his thinking, his assistant, Charlie Sorenson, later denied it. 

            Others in Detroit were also thinking of economies of scale and efficiencies during this time. For example, Billy Durant’s Buick, under the helpful guidance of Walter P. Chrysler, was making 5,000 cars a year in 1912. Indeed, many elements of mass production existed long before events would unfold at Ford’s Highland Park factory.

Frederick Winslow Taylor and “One Best Way”

To understand the context of the development of the assembly line at Ford’s Highland Park facility, one must first discuss the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor. In Principles of Scientific Management Frederick W. Taylor acknowledged the power of the craftsman and railed against their “systematic soldiering,” or output restriction.¹⁴Stephen Meyer has pointed out this aspect of scientific management, as he asserted that “With Frederick W. Taylor, early automobile industry engineers and managers found such skilled workers an obstacle to their plans for a more systematic organization of production.”¹⁵   For Taylor and his followers, the task was to either subtly, or forcefully, shift power relations on the shop floor.  

Frederick Winslow Taylor, Stevens Institute of Technology, Williams Library, Hoboken, NJ.

Taylor was born in 1856 to a wealthy Philadelphia family. After an abortive semester at Harvard, where young Taylor temporarily lost his eyesight due to a nervous condition, he returned home where he became an apprentice at the Midvale Steel Company. Midvale Steel was to Taylor what the Big Horn Mountains would be for future president Theodore Roosevelt, as his health was restored and life purpose defined. Of course, Taylor was no ordinary apprentice at Midvale, returning as he did each night to his family’s residence in exclusive Germantown and maintaining his membership at the Germantown Cricket and Tennis Club. 

            At Midvale, Taylor would begin to formulate ideas that would later form the basis of scientific management. Scientific management, with an emphasis on efficiency and time and motion studies, sought to place within the purview of management the control of the work process, empowering the industrial engineer rather than the shop foreman or floor worker. At the heart of scientific management was a piece rate system, a ‘carrot or stick’ approach that rewarded or punished workers depending on whether output matched or exceeded predetermined goals or fell short of them. In theory, scientific management proposed that there was one best way to do anything, from building a car to hitting a golf ball.¹⁶